Facebook has sent out what could be one of the world's largest "legitimate" mass e-mailings to date. The e-mail was sent to all one billion Facebook users of their proposal to modify the site’s governance structure and remove the ability for users to vote on changes to the policy.

The social media company wants to replace its current system which allows users to vote for or against changes. Currently the system allows for proposed changes that get over 7,000 comments, to be pushed to a ballot so that all users may vote, and if over 30 percent vote for or against the changes, their decision is binding.

The new system would focus on soliciting better feedback from users through new features, preventing votes from being triggered by "copy and pasted" comments by privacy activists. Facebook's proposal will continue to offer users a seven-day comment period on proposed changes to its governing documents. It will also offer two additional ways for users to voice their governance concerns.

One of these will be an “Ask the Chief Privacy Officer” which will allow direct questions to Erin Egan, Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer. The other option will be when Erin Egan will hold scheduled town hall style live-streamed webcasts where users can ask questions about their issues. If the 7,000-comment threshold isn’t met for Facebook's current proposal, or if it is and fewer than 300 million users vote to block today’s proposal, users in the future will no longer be able to vote on site governance alterations.

In addition to this major change, Facebook has proposed several minor changes to the language in Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and its Data Use Policy.

Boffins at Concordia University in Quebec have worked out a way of identifying the author of an email by sniffing out patterns in their writing style.

Their research, published in the journal Digital Investigation, could kill off the days of anonymous internet trolls and defamation. Even if a troll works through an anonymisor and through several relay servers, their writing style will give them away. The boffins have come up with techniques that could be used to serve up evidence in court, giving law enforcement more detailed information than a simple IP address can produce.

Study co-author Benjamin Fung, a professor of Information Systems Engineering at Concordia University, in a statement that there had been an alarming increase in the number of cybercrimes involving anonymous emails. These can be used to transmit threats or child pornography, facilitate communications between criminals or carry viruses."

The downside is that the technique could be used to reveal identities of whistleblowers or others who have legitimate reasons for sending emails via publicly available tools for sending anonymous messages. The boffins tested their system by putting it to use on over 200,000 emails from 158 employees of Enron, and were able to identify authors 80-90 per cent of the time.